9 - Occasion Types

Remember? User's Guide

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You don't consider all the events in your life to be of equal importance. Your mom's birthday is probably more important to you than the fact that next week is President's Day. Occasion types allow you to create up to 32 different categories of occasions, each with its own unique appearance and importance.

Each type has a unique:

Every occasion you create must be assigned one of the available types. An occasion will begin using the attributes of the new type when it is saved.

Your type definitions are saved in a settings file in the system Preferences folder. This is important for users who share occasion files on a network because each of you is using a separate set of occasion types. This is good because it means each user controls how occasions of each type behave on their machine, but it can also be confusing. Each occasion contains an internal index into the available set of types rather than its name. If the guy across the network defined his types using the same names but in a different order, they will not match up exactly with yours. One of you will have to change to match the other if the exact names matter.

The Occasion Types Dialog

View or change the definitions of your types by selecting menu: Edit \ Occasion Types


The Occasion Types Dialog

1. Occasion Type list

The names of all 32 occasion Types. Click on one or use the up/down arrow keys to select a type. Click and drag a name up or down to rearrange the list order.

2. Name

Enter the type's name in this box. The name displayed in the list is updated when you select a different type.

3. Default Occasion Types

Put a check in the N box to use this type as the default for new occasions or the T box to set the default for new occasions created by menu: Occasion \ New 'to do'. The current N and T type(s) are indicated by small icons in the Occasion Type list.

4. Advance Notification

Used by the startup checks and the Of Interest date range to determine how far in advance you should be notified for occasions of this type.

5. Prefix and Text Style

The prefix string is drawn before the occasion's description in event lists and provides a distinctive marker for each type. It can be up to 8 character long, but you might want to stick with 1 or 2 characters because event lists are indented for the longest prefix.

The prefix is drawn in the text style selected for the type or you can select a special style such as a symbol font like Dingbats using pref: Appearance \ Occasion type prefix.

Click <Style...> to change the font, size, style and color for this type. They are used in event lists and for the pop-up alert icon color. The sample box gives a preview of the prefix and text style.

6. Alert Sound

The sound to play at alert time or at startup when an important occasion is found. Use any of the sounds in your System file or select System Alert Sound to play the standard system beep.

7. Action Checkboxes

The first two items let you select what happens at pop-up alert time. Turn off both if you never want alerts for occasions of this type. There are also master switches in Preferences to turn off these alert actions across the board.

Turn off the third checkbox if you don't want occasions of this type to appear in what's happening window event lists. For example, you can define a type for school related occasions and turn them off during the summer.

Click <OK> to end the dialog and save your changes, or <Cancel> to discard them.

Advance Notification Choices

Active Occasion Types

Only the types above the dotted line in the list will appear in the occasion type menu. Other types can't be selected but occasions already using them are unaffected. You can streamline the type menu by dragging unused types below the line or by dragging the dotted line itself.

Occasion Type Priorities

Types higher in the list have a higher "priority" than those below. The color and style of a what's happening window's calendar day is taken from its highest priority type. Also higher priority occasions are listed before lower with the same date and time. You can also choose to display each date's events sorted by type using pref: What's Happening \ Sort the events.

The Predefined Occasion Types

The default set of types provided should give you a few ideas idea of what is possible. Feel free to change them any way you like but you should probably not remove the Trivia type because it is used by all of the occasion collections provided on my web site.

Copyright ©1988-99 by Dave Warker, all rights reserved worldwide.

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